Best Product Practices for the Enterprise

In the dynamic landscape of large organizations, effective product ownership and management play a crucial role in driving successful product development and delivery. With complex systems, interdependencies, and multidimensional value streams, it’s essential to establish clear roles and best practices to ensure alignment and traceability. This article explores key considerations and strategies for product ownership and management in large organizations.

Scaled Roles and Managing Complexity

In large organizations, it's important to differentiate between the roles of product owner, product manager, and portfolio manager. Each role has distinct responsibilities, with the product owner focusing on the team-level product backlog, the product manager overseeing the roadmap and strategic vision of a specific product, and the portfolio manager managing a broader product portfolio. This differentiation is critical in managing the complexity of massive systems and interdependencies, ensuring appropriate ROI assessments, and avoiding impractical expectations of managing all roadmaps at a granular feature level. I have seen organizations missing roles at different levels, which leads to workstreams being covered by other stakeholders who either lack the needed capacity or skillsets to effectively handle the needed work, which always causes problems.

Leveraging Reusability and Composability

To expedite development and simplify maintainability organizations should look towards reusability as a strategic approach. Embracing composability it key for scalability and agility, particularly in the emerging API economy (note: typing that sentence makes me cringe with the buzziness, but I don’t know how to say that in a way that is more true and less concise). Design systems and core APIs enable not only improved, consistent end-user experiences on consolidated platforms, but also enhance developer experience and collaboration among other consumer stakeholders (product owners, business stakeholders, architects, etc.), facilitating seamless integration across diverse product portfolios.

The Power of Measurement and Empowerment

Measurement is essential in driving success and maintaining traceability from bottom to top. It is important to establish a culture of empowerment, enabling teams to make informed decisions and benefit from the impact they have on the business. However, in large organizations, the challenge lies in ensuring that teams can actually understand the impact of their decisions on business strategies several levels above them. Balancing empowerment with the need for alignment and strategic coherence requires clear communication, education, and transparency.

Balancing Business and Technology Objectives

To take measurement just a bit further: successful product ownership and management entail balancing business and technology objectives. Stakeholder management becomes crucial to bridge the gap between these two worlds. The ability to speak the language of both technology and business is key in articulating the value proposition, demonstrating the business case, and ensuring alignment with strategic goals, and if a traceable measurement can only tie up to one side, that is a sign that the product team may be underaligned with one side. If lacking traceability to business goals, that may result in a less viable or lower priority feature set being built. If it is the IT side that is lacking a clear tie to the work, tech debt may abound. Both sides must be kept in balance, and a clear measurement strategy and good communication are vital.

Evangelizing User Centricity

Maintaining a strong focus on user centricity is also paramount in large organizations. Embedding user research, usability testing, and continuous feedback loops into product development processes fosters a deep understanding of user needs and preferences. Advocating for user-centric design principles and driving a culture of empathy throughout the organization strengthens the ability to deliver meaningful products that resonate with users. In some immature enterprises, user research and design are seen as product functions, but the best product resources I have worked with know the criticality and challenge of effectively gathering unbiased research and advocating for user research specialist support to help collect and mine user data.

Conclusion

In large organizations, adopting best practices for product ownership and management is crucial to drive successful product outcomes. By establishing clear roles, leveraging and driving reusability, prioritizing measurement and empowerment for both business and technology objectives, and emphasizing user centricity, organizations can position themselves for effective product development and delivery in a rapidly evolving marketplace.